New Jersey court enforces an arbitration award of 45 parking spaces, indefinitely
New Jersey court enforces an arbitration award of 45 parking spaces, indefinitely
2026-09-15 · New Jersey · Courts
A New Jersey master condominium association has held on to 45 parking spaces, permanently, because an arbitrator said so and a court declined to second-guess him.
Hudson River Associates, LLC and 225 River Road DFT 2017, LLC v. The Promenade at Edgewater Condominium Association, Inc., Board of Trustees, and L. Peres & Associates, Inc., Docket A-0398-24, was argued September 16, 2025 and decided November 17, 2025, with RREEF America REIT II Corp. HH, Edgewater Promenade 123, Inc. and Riverview at City Place, Inc. intervening. Unpublished, not precedential under R. 1:36-3.1
What was awarded
The arbitrator required the developer and owner of a facility to maintain 45 replacement parking spaces "indefinitely" for the master association.
The challenge, and why it failed
The appellants argued the arbitrator had exceeded his authority by not applying specific provisions of the Master Declaration. The panel affirmed confirmation of the award.
The governing standard comes from the New Jersey Arbitration Act, N.J.S.A. 2A:23B-23(a), and the review it permits is very narrow. The panel acknowledged the principle appellants relied on — "[a]n arbitrator's authority is circumscribed by the agreement of the parties and an arbitrator may not exceed that scope" — and then applied the limit that defeats most such challenges: disagreement with the arbitrator's interpretation is not grounds to vacate.
Why the setting matters
This is a mixed-use waterfront complex: residential condominium, commercial components, structured parking, and a master association sitting above them. Disputes in that structure are almost always about a shared resource whose allocation was set decades earlier in a document nobody involved negotiated.
The clause that decided it was in a settlement term sheet
The arbitration was not a creature of the Master Declaration's own dispute-resolution article. It arose from a settlement term sheet containing an arbitration clause — which is how a great many long-running association-versus-developer disputes in New Jersey get resolved.
That distinction drives the outcome. When parties settle a dispute by agreeing to arbitrate what is left, they have handed the arbitrator the question, and the arbitrator's reading of the underlying declaration becomes the answer. An argument that he read the declaration wrongly is, by design, unreviewable.
What "indefinitely" means here
It means the obligation has no stated end date, and the award fixing it is confirmed and final. A later owner of the burdened property takes it subject to that obligation.
For a master association, that is close to the best available outcome for a parking dispute — better, in durability terms, than a negotiated licence with a renewal date. For a developer or a successor owner, it is a permanent encumbrance created in a forum with almost no appellate review.
The category-level lesson for New Jersey associations
Three things generalise from this.
First, arbitration clauses in association settlement documents are not boilerplate. They determine, in advance, that whatever the arbitrator concludes about the governing documents will stand. A board signing a term sheet should understand that it is choosing finality over correctness.
Second, "the arbitrator ignored our declaration" is close to a dead argument in New Jersey. N.J.S.A. 2A:23B-23(a) lists the grounds for vacatur — corruption, fraud, evident partiality, an arbitrator exceeding powers, procedural defects — and an interpretive disagreement is not among them, however strongly held.
Third, in mixed-use complexes the master association's shared-resource rights are worth establishing durably while there is leverage to do it. Parking, access easements, loading, utility rooms and roof rights in a condominium-over-retail structure are exactly the items that become contested when the commercial component changes hands.
A note on what this decision does not do
It does not hold that the Master Declaration was correctly interpreted, and it does not establish any rule about parking allocation in New Jersey master associations. It holds that a confirmed award stands. Boards citing it for a substantive parking proposition would be citing it for something it does not say.
Where it fits in the 2025-26 picture
Together with Haffert v. Bell Tower — in which a court's attempt to raise a confirmed award's interest rate was vacated — this is the second New Jersey association decision in the window reinforcing the finality of confirmed arbitration awards. For a body of practice that leans on alternative dispute resolution as heavily as New Jersey community-association law does, that consistency is the practically useful takeaway.
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